


and the words you want are out of reach (but they’ve never been so loud)

by patriciaselina



Series: Second-Person Synthesis [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen, Heavily narrative style, No Dialogue, Second-Person POV, Spoilers 'till Reichenbach, The author is a very wordy young lass
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-10
Updated: 2013-03-10
Packaged: 2017-12-04 19:53:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/714463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patriciaselina/pseuds/patriciaselina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Mind Palace will always still be, at the heart and soul and innermost workings of it, a house. Your name is Sherlock Holmes, your flatmate is out, you are ineffably bored, and everyone knows how bad you are at housekeeping. Against all your best efforts to purge silly sentiment, you still keep a copy of C.S.Lewis’ The Four Loves neatly tucked away in one of the darker recesses of your memory palace.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and the words you want are out of reach (but they’ve never been so loud)

  


* * *

As a direct consequence of another one of your long–forgotten experiments, the clock in your shared flat never makes a sound. But your treacherous, inhospitable mind deigns to make you imagine it making such sounds, still. That is exactly what you're hearing now – “ _tick, tock, tick, tock_ ,” in a ruthlessly endless cacophony.

Your mind has resorted to wreaking havoc on the silence that it had deemed to be comfortable a mere few hours ago. There is no mistake, no: you are, without a doubt, utterly and completely bored.

The layperson would be so quick as to term this situation of yours as being “bored out of one's mind”. Not for the first time, you find yourself wishing that silly idiom was actually a very literal occurrence: if only you really could leave behind the confines of your mind, and with it that damnable, detestable clock–ticking.

For all your insistence that your mind is the finest specimen all of England has had the good liberty of laying their pithy little eyes on, it is still tangible. Still finite.

Your Mind Palace boxes you inside with facts and patterns and endless calculations, and there are the times when you wish that your mind won't default to locking you in it every time you get inconsolably bored. You know that your memories are in great need of reorganization. You know just as well as your subconscious does that your prized mental hard drive is slowly but surely regressing to the state of those found in a teenager's computer – jumbled, disorganized, collecting a series of files senselessly thrown together. And so you know – better than you know yourself – that you do need to stop slacking off and start making house.

But you can be honest, and most of all you can be honest to yourself:

Your name is Sherlock Holmes and you have always known that homemaking was never, ever, _ever_ going to be your ‘thing’.

It is in the middle of your third hour, and you’re halfway into one of those annoyingly sappy, distressingly addictive soap operas when you mull over this, and in the process of mental housekeeping realize: you've never _really_ understood what it was to love someone.

Your emotions lie in the same category as housekeeping, that way: it has never been one of your strong points. Rather, it has always been one of your most annoying blind spots – like heliocentricity and political hierarchies, petty little things that John yells at you when (not if, _when_ : it’s a fact of life and he’ll learn to live with it, someday) you inevitably Shift-plus-Delete and forget.

 _John_.

Another thing you realize: so _that's_ why everything has been so boring. He’s been gone and you didn’t see him go, as usual. It’s not that his comings and goings are too unremarkable for you to notice, like he obviously assumes, but that when he says he’s leaving you stay in an adamant state of denial that he will leave, that you will once again be left with this chair and this telly and this myriad of experiments with no him to bounce off ideas with. It’s strange, it’s beyond acknowledgment, it’s terrifyingly codependent and it’s going to be the death of you someday, but you suppose you do not care.

You always say that humanity is by and large a bumbling, semi–coherent mess of dullness and normalcy, but for all your insistence and avowal you do not even dare to lump John in with the rest of them.

An odd thing, that. But you find yourself thinking, with a very odd twinge of something you cannot for the life of you comprehend, that John being different from all the rest is the only thing you can ever be sure of in all the world.

* * *

 

You don't really know what it means to love someone 'like a brother'.

You _seriously_ need to stop watching these soap operas. They are very quickly growing to intrude on your mental facilities, but what can you do? It has been seven hours, and your meager human body cannot find it in itself to vacate the comforts of the sofa set you have found yourself ensconced within.

Amidst the madness of the machinations of your brain going _tick–tock–tick_ , and the almost deafening lull of the inane family drama blaring on the telly, focusing on these uncharacteristic thoughts you find your boredom–addled brain resorting to is growing to be a comfortable silence.

You've felt many things towards Mycroft, but you are absolutely sure that you can call none of them _love_. That would be an emotion too _personal_ for his liking, you reckon.

Your brother always was – was, is, and forever and ever will be – just like you, in a way. You hold the world out at an arm's length; close enough for you to see them but not enough for them to see you back. Both of you say the same thing, almost down to the exact same words – the world is tedious and idiotic and you would rather scoop up your own insides with a rusty spoon than force yourselves to cohabit with it – well maybe those would not be the words Mycroft would use, but you are you and not him, so you don't really care for the silly little details. That's _his_ job.

Sometimes, you allow yourself to think how things would have been had it been John who was your brother, and not that prissy brolly–toting bureaucrat. Would he still have been the same, even if he now had the Holmes name firmly embedded in his repertoire? Would he still have been a doctor, enlisted in the army? Would he still have thought that you were brilliant, even if, being your brother, he would now then be there to see you when you willingly let yourself waste away?

It's a thought that serves to further exacerbate than fully placate you. On the first day you met, you knew that he was not proud of his sister's travails with the bottle. It was written across his mobile, yes, but John had always ever been an honest man. His disappointment had laid itself bare in his actions, and so you know more than anyone else that his sister the drunkard was never someone he would call brilliant, or fantastic, or extraordinary.

And it scorches you straight to the bone, this. You had dabbled in a vice worse than alcohol – back then, you had said that you were bored (not lonely, _never_ lonely, just bored, that's all), that everything was just one big experiment that tested the limits of your hold on your full facilities. Surely he would not be proud of you, then. Surely he would leave you behind like he did his Harry, just another story for someone else to read through his face.

But – and you allow yourself this completely egregious flight of fancy, _but_ – you'd seen the look in his eyes when Lestrade pulled that drugs bust stunt, what seemed to be a eon ago now. He had stood up for you so adamantly, so fervently, and it had only been one day but you could feel how your heart (the one you vowed you had _already_ thrown away) threatened to metaphorically burst from the tone of his voice alone. Maybe, just _maybe_ , if it had been him and you, it would have been different.

So you allow yourself to believe this flight of fancy: maybe if he was there to do something as sentimental as hold your hand as you made your world crumble around you in a fit of childish rage, he would have brought about something just as sentimental – you dare say, just as _good_ – from deep within your twisted excuse of a psyche.

Because you know John Hamish Watson from head to toe to conscience to trigger finger, and you know that brother or not, he will stop at nothing to make sure that you are safe.

And you find yourself thinking, with no small amount of pride, that you can love him for that alone.

**_στοργή_ ** _, storge,  is fondness through familiarity ( a brotherly love ), especially between family members or people who have otherwise found themselves together by chance._

_It is described as the most natural, emotive, and widely diffused of loves: natural in that it is present without coercion; emotive because it is the result of fondness due to familiarity; and most widely diffused because it pays the least attention to those characteristics deemed “valuable” or worthy of love and, as a result, is able to transcend most discriminating factors._

* * *

 

Another thought comes, unbidden, while you read the filthy secrets of the late night talk show host from the back of her collar and the crinkling of her eyelids. As is to be expected, you have not vacated the premises of your beloved sofa for the past ten hours, now – bad news for experiments, good news…for nobody else in particular.

Not even for you. John keeps nagging at you for not eating right, and although your physical body parts keep agreeing with him, your brain simply grunts and tells everyone to very kindly shut up. _Mind over matter, after all_ , you remind yourself calmly: _mind over matter._

Then again, maybe you could count this as an experiment. The hypothesis would probably read something like: _How many hours can a person sit through mindless telly without moving until his brain succumbs to the indulgent pleasure of collapsing in on itself?_

They're having some kind of intervention tonight, you notice. Putting a young woman in the same place as her estranged friend and crazed stalker – an imbecilic move, even for them. Hadn't they seen the way he looked upon the girl as if she was something delicious, set aside for him and him alone? The eyebrows and the disgusting curl of the lip were kind of a dead giveaway. It makes you want to shout bloody murder at the screen. Maybe you do. You don't know, nobody's there to tell you if you did.

Girl says _we were just friends, I'm sorry_ and you find yourself thinking: why is it always _'just'_ friends?

You find that the usage of the word 'just' in the phrase in question offends you. It is as if society is relegating the term to second–rate, minor–level. As if there was something else that was supposed to prevail, and gaining someone's friendship was a mere pithy consolation prize. This was probably what led the crazed man on the telly over the edge – he did not give much thought to her friendship and thought that a relationship between them would only be meaningful if it was _more_. You admittedly beg nobody’s pardon and say you disagree.

You've never had much experience with friends. Nobody's ever wanted to see you up close, which was just as well because, as had been said many times before, you didn’t ever want to see them up close either. There is after all a reason why you put so much of your time in deducing – you like it best when you don’t have to expect much of anything from anyone. For someone like you who doesn’t care much about people in general, having a way to know how people were and how they ticked was instrumental in getting to know them before actually getting to know them. This, however, is also the reason why you’ve never really had friends.

Oh, but you could have, easily. The Holmes clan was a good, strong family name. You’ve always known that you could charm the tail feathers of a peacock if you wanted to, and even the richest of English schoolboys would never say no to a treat or two. If you wanted to, you would have been the most popular boy in school, and not just because you sent each and every teacher crying because of something you saw in their smudged makeup or the scuffmarks on their heels. If you had only made some semblance of an effort, like everyone else surely did.

But the point is you _didn’t_ , which leads you to where you are now. Years have passed, and you are still not like everyone else, you are still Sherlock Holmes, and you live in this weirdly gorgeous apartment with a charming old landlady fussing over you like a mother hen and…well, the most fantastic flatmate anyone would have the good fortune to have.

You are not a religious person, not in the very least – you believe that people make their own lives and their own mistakes, and lives aren’t following a schedule already set by some deity on high long ago – but for some reason you feel you should thank someone, anyone, for bringing John here, to London, to _you_.

( _Stamford is the one who should be thanked,_ you think quizzically, _would he especially mind being deified?_ )

You have never really seen the rhyme and reason behind friendship, and you would be lying if you said you saw it now. But you have seen John, you have long known the rhyme and reason behind his existence in your life, and you can honestly say that the fact that you need him somehow is a hypothesis you’ve long proven. It is a fact that you’ve long since accepted as an outright law.

The tackling beside the pool (you can still hear his voice, so clear and strong to your ears: “ _Run, Sherlock, run!_ ”) only served as a supporting document.

 **_φιλία_ ** _, philia,  is the love between friends. Friendship is the strong bond existing between people who share common interest or activity._

_Lewis immediately differentiates Friendship Love from the other Loves. He describes Friendship as, “the least biological, organic, instinctive, gregarious and necessary of our Loves” – our species does not need Friendship in order to reproduce._

_He uses this point to explain that Friendship is exceedingly profound because it is freely chosen._

* * *

 

You don’t think you will ever know what it means to be in love with someone.

Something you _do_ know, however, is that something in you broke during the holidays when she gleefully allowed herself into the precipices of your mind without asking for permission – but then again, she never really was one for asking first, wasn’t she? You do not know what it is, or was, or will be, but it happened and it is probably the reason why you came to be right there making a show of holding a blade to her throat, looking at her and telling her to run.

She will always be significant, will always be important to you in some capacity, but probably not in the way she held _you_ important in her uncharacteristic bout of sentimentality, and you know that. She knows that, too, she ultimately said that herself.

 _I think he likes you better than I do_ , she had said, and for one fleeting moment you find yourself wishing it were true in some way.

It’s decidedly _not_ for the same reason that people immediately assume once they see you and him together – two twos don’t _always_ have to make a four, who’s to say that what’s between you both is just plain and simple addition? But you do know that Irene is not the only one who lets her heart rule her head, like you had oh–so–eloquently put it earlier.

Sentimentality is something you wished you could chuck off as easily as your concern over nonsense social niceties and tact, but the fact remains that it is here and it is the reason why both of you still are. How else were you supposed to explain how, the moment someone hurts a single hair on his head, your brain immediately begins thrumming with the knowledge of _rex talionis_ , retributive justice, plotting retaliation – well–placed kicks and punches, glorious revenge? How when faced with his imminent danger, you would rather fall absolutely into pieces than give him up?

It is a weakness; you know that this is one even before Moriarty said _I will burn the heart out of you_. You are dangerous to everyone in existence, probably most especially to yourself, and this is by far the paramount reason why nobody ever was allowed closer than an arm’s–length. Why you deemed it better to be seen as the outsider with the silly coat and the weird personality who nobody liked, because that way you never had to worry about anyone.

Though you would never admit it to anyone, least of all yourself, you are still a terribly, bordering on lethally lonely man, and so you know that anyone would pour thirty–odd years of sentiment into a friendship, it would be you. Which would make him even more of a liability – just as you know that he’s taken to keeping you a part of him, like an internal organ or something else that cannot be removed so easily, you know that he is the thrumming undercurrent to your thoughts, the one narrating when you stumble into the part of your memory palace that housed your case files. You know that losing you would destroy him, and you know that losing him will obliterate you.

You never really knew when you started thinking of the pair of you as one coherent unit. Hearing people saying your name without his following close made you uneasy, as if someone had just plucked off the oxygen atoms off water and still deemed it water and not plain hydrogen gas. It was not right to be apart from him, which was why every time you had to shut him out for her sake, it made something else crumble down within you.

And you heard everything he had told her, everything he had almost raged at her. It was for you, always and forever was going to be for you. You’re not blind to his worry – you know that he counts off every text she sends you, and that he still keeps watch over your room to ensure your sleep and safety, even when his bedroom is for all intents and purposes still upstairs. You heard that other woman too, when she said that he would do anything for you. Although it should be impossible you can feel something different when you are faced with the reality of how strongly he cares, as there was a roaring furnace nestled comfortably in the space between your lungs and you don’t ever want to shut it down.

This is why it stings, just a little bit, each and every time he protests against anyone calling you a couple. You know you aren’t one, in the common sense of the word – he doesn’t like men that way, and you don’t think you’ve ever cared enough to think about what you would have liked – but still, you _are_ a couple, still a pair of blokes who live with and fuss over and bicker with each other, still two people who would go to hell and back to keep each other safe, and his brushing off of this word and its connotation that you are bonded, that you are together in a way mere ‘love’ can no longer explain, still, surprisingly, _alarmingly_ , hurts.

 **_ἔρως_ ** _, eros, is love in the sense of 'being in love' or 'loving' someone._

_Lewis concludes that Eros can become a god to people who fully submit themselves to it. He says that it can be an extremely profound experience for people even up to the point of suicide pacts and furious refusals to part._

* * *

 

Fallacious or not, dying is still _dying_ , and while you have always said you never really cared much for death you never did imagine it to fall into place quite like this.

Here is how the story goes: when death finally takes you, it takes you alone.

It's not even because of the presumed usual suspects – wounded pride or deranged thought or utter boredom – but because of one simple throwaway little thing: John had told you that friends protect people.

And so that is precisely, _exactly_ , what you do.

 **_ἀγάπη_ ** _, agapē, is the love that brings forth caring regardless of the circumstance._

_Lewis recognizes this as the greatest of loves._

* * *

 

 

 

**END.**

**Author's Note:**

> My first foray into writing actual fiction for the BBC Sherlock community. Hello, fandom. I love you from afar, because everyone’s brilliant and I can’t help but notice how much I pale in comparison. Oh, well. I do hope someone out there likes this, anyhow.
> 
> The title is from _Beside You_ by Marianas Trench, which if you could remember – yes, there is a glorious JohnLock AMV set to that song, one of my favorites, really. It was by Deductism on YouTube, and [you should check it out](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXoc33BOBNs&list=PL899F8EA093DCA654&index=1)! It’s exactly how I see their relationship to be, and shows exactly what I wanted to portray in this fic. I admittedly did not achieve this as well as I wanted to, but here’s to hoping I came near to doing so.
> 
> I’m not an outright shipper of romantic JohnLock, but I do appreciate it on its own merits and know that lots of people love it to hell and back, so I intentionally left it as vague as I could…well.
> 
> The snippets in italics after each part are from the Wikipedia article for The Four Loves. I know, _Wikipedia_ , but it was the reference whose passages gave me the wording I was looking for.
> 
> The whole time I was writing this down (on scraps of papers, the margins of my notebooks, my cellular phone), I kept remembering one of John and Sherlock’s convos from the fantastic meta–fic [The Theory of Narrative Casualty](http://falling-voices.livejournal.com/18100.html) – “You like my petty.” “God knows why. I don’t, however, like your adverbs.”
> 
> Same, Sherlock, same. I don’t like _my_ adverbs either. I’m just in general a really wordy person, both in literature and real life, so don’t think I’m just using these weird long sentences and big words in an attempt to somehow impress the fandom I’m in. If you’ve seen my tumblr – come on, I even write about _anthropomorphic English trains_ this way, too.
> 
> Oh! If it wasn’t kind of clear, the different segments happen at different times. The first and second ones are kind of set some time after Banker, and the third is obviously after the Game – the fourth after Belgravia, and we all know which heart–wrenching episode the last part is from. The last part is short on purpose, believe me. It was not because the mere thought of writing anything remotely related to Reichenbach brought me to my knees. No, I’m not shaking, that’s just dust in my eye, I _swear_.
> 
> I write in second person in an attempt to make it more…detached but not quite, or disjointed, somehow. Let’s just agree that writing this had made me see more ‘you’s than I ever thought I’d see. More than enough for a lifetime. But do I want to see more? God, yes.
> 
> 400-plus words on an author’s note…I told you I was a very wordy person, didn’t I? I’m sorry.
> 
> Thank you for reading this, again.


End file.
